


Disassembly

by LananiA3O



Series: Batfam Week prompt fills [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games)
Genre: Death Traps, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 20:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11192931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: The Riddler has set a trap for The Red Hood, expecting him to be nothing but a brainless brute, who will charge head-first into his doom. Things don't go quite as planned.





	Disassembly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loxare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loxare/gifts).



> Written to fill this Batfam Week prompt by Loxare:  
> http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/post/161791740783/sliiiiiiiides-in-eddie-setting-a-trap-for-red
> 
> Loxare, I hope you're happy. Thank you for your continuous support of my work :)

He approached the abandoned warehouse on Archer’s Square with due caution, perching on a particularly ugly street light that tinged the entire street below him in a harsh, tangerine glow. The building looked desolate and empty, but Jason knew the truth. His disastrous run-in with Croc, just before Christmas, might have benched him for two months, but that did not mean that he had been out of the loop. In between everyone’s casefiles, Dick’s and Tim’s patrol reports, Barb’s and Alfred’s discussion of current research, and the news coverage of half a dozen channels, Jason had caught the gist of it.

There had been two illegal businesses for the price of one here: storage for smuggled drugs in the basement and an illegal puppy mill in the warehouse proper. Robin had cleaned out both only two weeks ago.

That should have been the end of it, but oh no. Someone just had to lure him here. It was definitely a lure. Bloody red bat with ominous writing painted on a wall near his usual patrol starting point at Mercy Bridge? Check. Trail of human blood across half of Gotham to a secluded location? Check. Silence that cut just a little too deep? Check.

Well, he had been there before, and he was not going to make the same mistake twice. He double- and triple-checked both the trackers in his waistband and his helmet, sent a quick message to Oracle to inform her of his last-known, and jumped down to the street with a soft thud, crossing the forsaken road with quick, silent steps, and a fully loaded gun in his right hand.

The upper levels of the warehouse had been cleared of all human or canine inhabitants, but the kennels were still there, hundreds of little cages stacked high and tight, too small to fit anything but a terrier, and even that was pushing it. The smell of dog shit, piss, and blood still clung to the air, and even if he hadn’t had any good reasons for the helmet before, the sheer number of flies buzzing around the warehouse certainly would have given him one.

The trail led through the narrow alleys between the cages to a spot where there had once been a pile of crates full of dog food that had hidden the entrance to the drug stashes in the basement below: an old, rusty trap door.

 _Great. Like I haven’t had enough of that to last me a lifetime_ , Jason thought to himself as he stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and set out to work.

He checked for trip wires first, because, really, in this fucking job, you couldn’t be careful enough. When he found nothing, he lifted the door, switched his helmet to tactical vision mode, and descended into the darkness of the basement.

A darkness that was quickly illuminated in vivid green, as the lights came on in the scattered mass of question-mark-shaped neon conduits all around him.

Jason groaned at the sight in front of him. “Fucking great.”

The haughty laughter that suddenly echoed through the room did nothing to improve his mood. He could really think of better ways to spend his first week back on a patrol than to deal with the most annoying of all of Gotham’s dirty, crooked rats.

“Why hello there, Little Red Riding Hood!”

There was a TV screen mounted to the pillar to his front right and it sprang to life with a sharp buzz. From the slightly dusty screen, Edward Nigma’s haggard face gleamed back at him. Eddie’s year in Blackgate had not been kind to him, hollowing out an already bony face and thinning out an already unimpressive, mud-brown mop of slowly-graying hair. Eddie looked like hell. Unfortunately, he had not lost an ounce of his obnoxiousness.

“I am pleased to see that you have so naïvely fallen for the oldest, most predictable, and simple-minded trap in the history of vigilante lures. Alas, more important matters than a gun-toting, show-boating would-be-cowboy in cheap leather have kept me from finishing _this_ – the latest iteration of my most beautifully designed and flawlessly crafted riddles. Thankfully, even this half-finished prototype should still be enough to provide a mesmerizing, mortifying, and ultimately mortiferous challenge for a brainless, boorish brute such as you. Rest assured that your last dismal and discomfiting efforts shall be broadcast to all of Gotham through the cameras installed in every single corner of this room.”

Under the mask, Jason’s gaze flicked to the corners of the room quickly. Eddie was right about one thing at least – the cameras were on. Through the slightly static comms line, Oracle’s voice confirmed that Nigma had indeed started broadcasting to every single public billboard in Gotham.

“Tales shall be told of the pitiful, pale pretender to the cowl, whose intelligence could not even measure up to that of any of the mangy mutts who had crawled through this place before. You are a master of none, Little Red Riding Hood, and soon, all of Gotham shall see you for what you are – worth even less than the lowest, puppy-mill-bred dog. Oh, but first, I think we should run through the ground rules for tonight’s spectacle. Rule the first: You will address me at all times—“

Barbara groaned ever so slightly through the comms at the same time as Jason rolled his eyes.

“Good Lord in heaven, have mercy! This presumptuous list of insane regulations was already bordering on mental torture when he gave it to Bruce more than a year ago!”

“Don’t worry, Oracle,” Jason muttered, loud enough to pass through the comms, but also quiet enough to avoid making it onto the broadcast. “I’ve got it covered. Give me five minutes.”

With a deep breath, Red Hood pushed the grating narration by the megalomaniac, narcissistic man-child onto the back-burner and assessed his situation.

The basement was supposed to be one giant, hollow space, with only a number of supporting pillars blocking his view, but it was far from that now. A good six feet on either side of the room was now taken up by what looked like simple metal shipping containers, but showed up on his tactical vision as an intricate pattern of high-powered lasers, followed by a spiked patch of wall using a hydraulic spring mechanism on either side, and ending in a good-old-fashioned set of poisonous darts. The floor looked like harmless concrete, but he could see a hint of the wired mesh running along the surface just fine.

 _Electrocution, dismemberment, blunt force trauma, and poison._ Clearly this trap was far beyond half-finished.

At the end of the gauntlet, a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties and whose shirt was red with blood from a nasty cut on his shoulder sat strapped to a chair, secured by sturdy rope around his forearms and his shins, with three little blocks of C4 strapped to his stomach. The look on his face was one of sheer despair, and the display on the detonator did not help.

“Gimme three minutes and twenty-eight seconds,” Jason corrected. He set the timer on his visor.

The spike-traps would have to go first. He retrieved one of his many small knives from its sheath on the inside of his lower left sleeve and started going to work on the TV screen, loosening the bolts and screws that kept it fixed to the pillar. From a second screen above the fake damsel in distress, Eddie’s face sneered at him.

“What do you think you are doing, you mentally deficient, mediocre muttonhead?”

Jason didn’t answer. _Don’t feed the trolls._ Instead, he finished unscrewing the TV, cradled it in his hands like a bowling ball, sent it careening down the narrow path to the ‘hostage’, and drew his guns almost instantaneously. The lasers were too high up to touch it; the spiked walls were not. He waited until they were fully extended, spearing through the TV while exposing the delicate mechanisms that caused them to move, and fired a full clip into each side. What the bullets did not shred, they jammed, and instead of withdrawing back into wall, the spikes remained where they were, now completely harmless.

“What?” Eddie sounded positively pissed. “This is not possible! The hydraulic mechanisms on that trap were perfect! How did you?”

Jason didn’t answer. Instead, he took a closer look at the containers. They were not of the standard single-door variety, but rather had doors on either side for better ease of access. The lock was electronic and probably strongly encrypted, but when had that ever stopped him? He retrieved a remote uplink bug from its little pouch on the right side of his belt, attached it to the container’s security console and hit it with his favorite little decryption program – a modification of the hacking protocol Barbara had shown him once. The doors clicked open to the rising pitch of Eddie’s exasperated voice.

“What?! That cannot be happening! Those boxes were unhackable! I made sure of it!!”

Jason didn’t answer. He stepped into the container and – instead of dismantling the industrial-strength laser machine right then and there, carefully unscrewed the hinges fixing it in place. He checked the timer quickly – still almost two minutes left – and tilted the laser to burn out the lasers on the other side. Only once all the lasers from the left were down, did he shut off the ones on his side.

The poison darts compartment was inaccessible from his current position, closed off by a sheet of metal to thick for the lasers to penetrate, but thankfully, he would soon have a perfect way to deal with those from the other side. By the time he exited the container again, Eddie was fuming.

“You are CHEATING! I KNOW you are!! No dull-minded creature like you could crack MY protocols! Who is helping you?”

Jason didn’t answer. He took out his altered Batclaw, zip-kicked straight into the spiked wall mechanisms, and climbed up the metal contraptions as soon as his feet hit solid resistance, effectively crossing the now harmless laser traps and two thirds of the electrified floor in a single bound. From there, it was just a short leap above the poison darts down to the terrified hostage. The counter now read one minute and eighteen seconds.

Eddie was shouting of course. Some thing or another about inferior intelligence and cheating and blabla-whatever-the-fuck-he-really-couldn’-care-less. It was background noise to be tuned out, same as the panicked, muffled cries of the gagged hostage.

“It’s gonna be ok,” Jason muttered as his fingers traced the wires to see what was connected where. He had to give Eddie credit for one thing: he knew how to build a moderately complicated bomb. Emphasis on _moderately_. “I’ll have you out of here in about...” A quick glance at the timer. “Forty-six seconds.”

The C4 block to the right came off first, then the block to the left. The man looked down at him in utter confusion and the tone of his rambling went from frightened to angry. Jason didn’t blame him. If he had sat on a chair with C4 strapped to his belly and someone had taken apart the bomb piece by piece rather than just disarming it, he would have been pissed to. Still, that last block of C4 was their ticket out of this place.

He was down to twenty-one seconds when the explosive belt finally came off, with the bomb, detonator and all the really important wiring still intact. He turned around quickly, threw it onto the electrified floor, and grabbed the hostage – chair and all – just in time to duck into cover behind one of the containers.

The C4 went off with deafening bang, but the noise-dampeners in his helmet compensated quickly, drowning out most of the harmful sounds. He made sure to keep one hand on the man’s shoulder as he cut him free, to save him from running straight into his untimely doom. The darts were still active – a fact that Eddie gleefully gloated over with all the excitement of a child whose sole comfort after having had all his lunch sandwiches stolen was that he had licked them first – but that would not take much work. After all Eddie had handed him just the right tool for this job. Jason took the chair and passed it up and down in front of the holes containing the darts, watching with a slight grin as the little toxin-dipped arrows sprang from their carefully hidden holes, only to prattle uselessly against a lifeless wooden board.

He double-checked with his tactical vision to make sure that all darts were exhausted and the electric current in the floor had indeed been interrupted, before leading the hostage forward slowly. The man was still shaking in his boots, but with a little bit of encouragement, he still got him to climb the broken spike-walls and jump off the other side. Jason followed quickly, rolling his shoulders and neck as he landed.

“Well, that was fun.”

To his surprise, there were not just one, but two whines that suddenly reached his ear.

The first one was undeniably Eddie, now rambling almost incoherently, screaming through the second TV set mounted above the stairs to the trap door.

“YOU SWINDLER!!! YOU CHARLATAN!!! YOU DIRTY, LYING CHEATER!!! HOW DARE YOU??!!! I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU DID IT, BUT YOU CHEATED AND WHEN I FIND OUT HOW I’M GOING TO MAKE SURE YOUR DEMISE WILL BE SLOW AND PAINFUL AND UTTERLY HUMILIATING, YOU AMATEURISH CRETIN!!!! I AM THE _KING_ OF GOTHAM’S INTELLECTUAL ELITE AND I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED BY A MINDLESS BRUTE WITH **LESS INTELLIGENCE THAN A DOG**!!!”

Jason scoffed at that. “Sure you will, _King of Fools_.” He switched his comms back online and was instantly greeted by the sound of Barbara’s sweet voice.

“Good job, Hood. Are you okay?”

“Never been better. Say, did you get the entire performance?”

“Every last second,” Barb answered slowly and he could just hear her grin through the lines. “As a matter of fact, the video is currently trending on Youtube. So are #DontMessWithRedHood and #RiddlerPWNed on Twitter and Tumblr. Nightwing started those. Let me show you.”

Only a second later, Jason had the pleasure of watching Eddie’s speech dissolve into the realm of the completely unintelligible, as Oracle hacked his broadcast and replaced half the screen with the related Twitter feed. Judging from the thousands of re-tweets, Gotham was having a field day. He watched the tweets fly by for a few moments longer, before Nigma reached somewhere off camera, shouting in anger and flailing his pitiful limbs. A few sparks later, the stream went black.

“Looks like the coward just rage-quit on us.”

“Awww, too bad, so sad,” Barbara giggled slightly. “Don’t worry, Robin’s gonna troll him with fake sympathy posts on Twitter for the next two weeks.” Five seconds later, Barb’s voice was back down to earth, down to business. “So... what are you going to do next?”

“Next...”

He took out the modified batclaw once more, pointed at the vent mounted high up on the wall next to the container and pulled sharply. The metal came off without a hitch and it only took him one quick reach into the opening to curl his hands around the squirming and _whining_ – he knew he had heard a second, smaller whine – little ball of fur stuck in there and remove it from the vent. If someone had put a gun to his head and told him to take a guess, he would have said ‘husky’, although it was hard to tell, what with the poor thing being covered in soot, dirt, and spider webs, and being starved to the point where it squirmed and twisted in his hand trying to get a bite off the man who had saved him.

“Next, I’m gonna find a some food and shelter for this poor, little fluff ball that got lost down here and had to listen to Eddie’s crazy ramblings and a C4 explosion.”

Barbara chuckled at the other end of the line. “Why not adopt him yourself?”

Jason scoffed at that. “Picking up strays? Do I look like B?”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I totally took a stab at who you think I did. Yes, I am still bitter about that tweet.


End file.
